UK, US, France blame Assad for chemical attack in Security Council draft resolution

But Moscow categorically rejected the draft resolution, said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. The area in which the attack happened is under complete control of terrorist groups whose positions are occasionally being targeted by the Russian and Syrian Air Force.

Syrian involvement in the alleged attack seems highly unlikely. After an unprecedented chemical weapon attack in Syria’s East Ghouta in 2013, when several hundred people were killed, Syria joined the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

In the agreement reached between Russia and the United States on the destruction of chemical weapons, Syria was put under the control of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), halting US military intervention in Syria. In January 2016, the OPCW announced that Syria’s entire chemical weapons arsenal had been destroyed.

The White Helmets and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, both NGOs that broke the news of the alleged attack, are notorious for their association with anti-Assad terror groups. The Turkish government has meanwhile closed the Bab Al Hama border crossing, refusing ambulances coming from the direction of Khan Sheikhoun, to enter Turkish territory.

The Syrian Army is advancing against the terrorists in the Northern countryside of Hama, especially the Al Nusra Front which started its large-scale offensive right after the beginning of the fifth round of talks in Geneva on settlement of the Syrian crisis in the last week of March.

The correspondent of the TV channel Orient News, sympathetic towards the militant Al Nusra Front, announced on this Twitter feed with some alarming foreknowlegde “the start of a new media campaign to cover the intensified number of air strikes, launched in the northern countryside of Hama, and the use of poisonous chlorine gas against civilians”.

The village of Khan Shaikhoun itself is located on the administrative border between the provinces of Hama and Idlib.

In 2013, after the Ghouta chemical attack, hacked emails from a British mercenary company were posted online, revealing that a chemical attack then blamed on Syria, could have been the work of other parties.

British mercenary company, Britam Defence, has since admitted it was hacked but claimed the hacker, who posted his online name as “JAsIrX,” had cleverly used hacked material to generate “forgeries”.

But the volume of hacked documents from Britam suggests otherwise, as its release coincided with warnings by Israel and the Obama White House that Syrian leader Bashar al Assad had to step down.

In all, 423 megabytes of zip files were hacked from Britam. Aside from the one on Syria, there outlines of plans for varying types of military actions to be undertaken.

Jaromír Kohlíček, Czech politician and a member of the European Parliament said that the Western and Arab states bear responsibility for the scourge of terrorism in Syria and Iraq.

In an interview with the Czech newspaper Blesk, he stated that the terrorist groups, operating in Syria, received financial support and equipment from the Saudi and Qatari regimes as well as from particular western states, namely the US, France and Great Britain, saying that the Syrian Army discovered weapons and equipment donated by certain western states, Great Britain including, following the liberation of the residential areas in eastern Aleppo.

Nikki Haley, US Ambassador to the United Nations, on Wednesday strongly condemned the Syrian government: “When the UN consistently fails in its duty to act collectively, there are times in the life of states that we are compelled to take our own action,” Haley said. She added that if the UN doesn’t take collective action, “we may”.

The New York Times and other mainstream US news outlets immediately pinned the blame on the Syrian government, reviving demands of a “no-fly zone” over Syria, which would amount to launching another “regime change” war on the country.

The Times assigned two of its most committed anti-Syrian-government propagandists to cover the Syrian poison-gas story, Michael B. Gordon and Anne Barnard, says Robert Parry of Consortium News. Parry, an investigative reporter, broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.

Gordon’s co-author, Judith Miller, became the only US journalist known to have lost a job over the reckless lies about Iraqi WMD’s that contributed to the human tragedy in that country.

Gordon himself was a co-author of a bogus Times’ front-page story on April 21, 2014, when the State Department and the Ukrainian government used fake pictures of Russian soldiers in Ukraine.